A good friend, JD, posed about his favorite home built computers since his first in 1997. So, one thought it would be appropriate to share one’s computing history.
Let’s start back, a long, long time ago, in the year 1997. That was the year one received one’s fist computer. It was nothing special, a salvaged embedded computer with a Pentium 100Mhz, with a 1GB 2.5″ drive and 32MiB of ram. When one received it, there was no OS on the hard drive, so one had the pleasure of learning how to install Windows 98 on it. Unfortunately, one does not have any photos of it, and the case has since been recycled (If one still had the case it’d be a nice mini-ITX case).
Fast forward a few years to February of the year 2000. This is when one built the fist and only, all new parts, computer. It had a Pentium 3 866Mhz (Coppermine core, 133Mhz FSB) in a slocket adapter to fit into a Soyo Slot 1 motherboard. It was equipped with 256MiB PC133 SDRAM, a 20GB 7200RPM Western Digital Caviar Hard Drive, a Creative Soundblaster Live, and an ATI Rage Fury Pro. The best thing was it had no problem playing all of the games one had at the time. Some time later, one upgraded the video card to a Nvidia Geforce MX 4000, upgraded the CPU to a P3 1.0Ghz, added a 200GB Western Digital Caviar SE, added a 16X Pioneer DVD burner, and added 512MiB of PC133 SDRAM.
Fast forward to February of 2006, one acquired a second hand Athlon 1.4Ghz (Thunderbird, 266 FSB). Joining it was an ATI Radeon 9600 (completely passive), the Creative Soundblaster Live from one’s previous box, and 512MiB of DDR ram. For storage, it had a 20GiB single platter Fireball drive, and one’s 200GB Western Digital Caviar SE. Eventually, one of the sticks of memory flaked out, and one replaced it with a 512MiB stick of DDR400.
After a few short months, in May of 2006, one upgraded again to a P4 2.0Ghz (Northwood, 400Mhz FSB). This was a brief stint when one did use on board sound, since the Intel motherboard supported 5.1 audio. One equipped it with 1.5GiB of DDR memory (mixed speeds), and a 160GB primary drive. Later, this was upgraded to a P4 3.0Ghz (Northwood, 800Mhz FSB) and the video card was upgraded to a Nvidia Geforce 6600GT.
Now, skip ahead to about a year ago, January 2009. One upgraded to a second hand Celeron 430 (OC’ed to 2.4 Ghz using a “pin” mod), with 4GiB of DDR2 800 memory, a 250 GB Western Digital RE drive, and a Radeon x800XL. This was one’s first system to have a SATA hard drive, and it had Windows 7 Beta installed on it. A month or two later, one upgraded the video card to a Radeon 4830 (and subsequently OC’ed it a little), and installed a Creative X-Fi Titanium. A few months later, the Celeron 430 was replaced with a Core 2 Duo E8500, a Blu-ray player was installed, and Windows 7 RC was installed on the hard drive.
Finally, we’re at the current box. One took the CPU, memory, Blu-ray player, and sound card, installed them in a new case (the very nice Lian Li PC-A05B). Windows 7 Pro (64bit), was installed onto a Intel X-25M (Gen 1), and a 300GB Western Digital Velociraptor was installed for storage. The motherboard was upgraded to a Gigabyte P45 chipset board. In the not so distant future, the PSU and video card are going to be replaced (to a Corsair 650HX and a Radeon 5800 series card), hence no cable management had been done yet.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
With the changing of years, months, and the forthcoming changing of seasons a change in design and accompanying style is immanent. Originally, these changes were to take affect last summer. Yet, somehow they were delayed, as have other projects. This comes from a desire to separate more professional content and personal content (well, it would allow the posting of more personal content as of late little has been posted). While being the self proclaimed “Enemy of the Spammers”, one has not made proper use of this tagline. So there are two options, earn the title, or relinquish it. One’s choice will be apparent in the coming weeks.
Now to talk about a neglected project. WP Trainer, still hasn’t seen the light of day, even though its code base size is equivalent to that of Breadcrumb NavXT. Lack of direction is really the reason for the delay. There is almost too much to do with it, after a concise scope is defined work will resume. The other hold up is that some portions rely on things that are possible in WordPress but are quite hackish to implement (many of these problems went away in WP 2.8, and more went away in 2.9). Currently, WP 3.0 is the target platform. Finally, some work being done at the moment on Breadcrumb NavXT will benefit this project.
Breadcrumb NavXT will probably have 3 feature adding releases in 2010 (3.5, 3.6, and 3.7). The current version in development, 3.5, will add support for custom post types and will contain many “under the hood” improvements which will be detailed at a later date. The release time frame for this around mid to late Q1. Version 3.6 will add extended support for WPMU/WP 3.0, essentially covering the one thing that makes WPMU a different animal. This release will correspond to the WP 3.0 release (probably in late H1).
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
Ok, so it has been a few weeks since the last post, and even longer since Breadcrumb NavXT 3.4.0 was supposed to be released. That said, last Saturday the translators were notified that the SVN trunk was ready for translation updates. At the moment, all but two of the translations are ready to go. Once those are updated, Breadcrumb NavXT 3.4.0 will be released.
Other than the release of Breadcrumb NavXT 3.4.0, one will more or less not exist until the 23rd (final exams). So, don’t fret if response times to questions extend past the normal sub 24 hour range.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
After mtekktux met an untimely demise, one did not have working parts to replace it. Once the new Atom 330 board arrived on Saturday, work commenced on fitting it into the Gateway FLEXATXSTC case of mtekktux. Yes, a little modding took place.
The back of the case does not have a standard IO shield hole, so one had to be cut with the trusty Dremel tool. Since this the board is the intel D945GCLF2, it requires the “Pentium 4″ 4 pin 12V connector. Well, the power supply in the case is a 70W ATX power supply, so a molex to P4 connector adapter had to be made. Luckily, the P4 connector from a dead Antec power supply was still around, as was a molex to 2x SATA power adapter. One of the SATA connectors on the adapter was removed, and the P4 connector soldered in the appropriate locations.
When trying to close/flip in the disk bracket (flips forward and contains the hard drive bay, 3.5″ bay, and 5.25″ bay), the hard drive hit the ATX power connector, and its bracket hit the memory. So off to another round of modifications. The 3.5″ bay needed new holes to accommodate the screw holes for the hard drive (who ever decided that floppy drives and hard drives should have different hole patterns should be punished). The lip of the bracket, which hit the memory, was trimmed back with the Dremel. Now everything fits in the case. There is some external aesthetics related work that needs to be done, but that can wait until the semester is done.
Since last night, Gentoo Linux has been installed, well actually it’s Funtoo (the Core 2 stage 3 was used). This is install number six using the handbook method, which seems shorter now than it used to be. At the moment, the internal network functions (samba, hplip, etc) are being installed and configured. Apache is already up and running (with the same USE flags as we use at Weblogs.us).
And for the curious, an Atom 330 runs just fine under the GCC “Core 2″ profile (in menuconfig for the kernel a similar option was set as well).
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
Well this morning an unsuccessful attempt to install Gentoo onto mtekktux failed horribly. Memtest86 does not get past 50 seconds before it completely hangs (keyboard lights flash). Something is very wrong with the motherboard/IDE controller. Tonight, the backup motherboard will be tried (have to see if one can find the memory that goes in that one). If all else fails, one will probably get one of those Atom 330 miniITX boards. Though the atom is quite anemic, it should be good at the occasional print job, running apache, and a few other miscellaneous tasks.
Update: It’s dead, the memory that is. The error presents itself with the backup motherboard and a different, known to be good CPU. So that means, mtektux will not get running this week.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]